High Heat 2004 has "budgets" for teams - you can have them be even,
based on the team/market (i.e., Yankees will have a big one, Expos a
small one), edit them all you want I think, or just shut the function
off.
Looking away from video games, anyone marketing a career-management
game without contracts will sink very quickly to the bottom these
days. The current contenders even generally have a revenue model that
touches on fanbase and broadcasting.
Cap management was always fun in Front Office Football, but I
preferred the late '90s as an era - player/player trades were
possible, and player/pick trades were common, but both are
disappearing in the current environment. Me, if I can't wheel and
deal, I'll go elsewhere.
Ironically, in the sport where cap management is the be-all and
end-all, and cap considerations are arguably more important than
actual talent in transactions, I don't know of an NBA game that even
touches on contracts at all.
--Craig
--
Craig Richardson (Homepage <http://crichard-tacoma.home.att.net>)
"Rapid prototyping has enormous, obvious advantages beyond destroying
humanity as we know it" -Michal Ash in rec.arts.sf.written [04/1/26]
->Ironically, in the sport where cap management is the be-all and
->end-all, and cap considerations are arguably more important than
->actual talent in transactions, I don't know of an NBA game that even
->touches on contracts at all.
EA Sports' NBA live series does contrat management. It's flawed, though.
The best players want max money even if no team can afford it, so he ends
up not being signed during the offseason. Which means you can wait for the
season to start and sign him to a one year contract for the minimum
salary, then re-sign him to a long-term deal using your Bird exception.
Do that over four or five years and you'll end up with a massive payroll
but a loaded roster.
--
M. Zaiem Beg zb...@iglou.com
Gack. I remember a similar problem in the Championship Manager series
'way back when. At some point, there was a problem with spiralling
salaries (usually paid by computer teams, who then went on their own
spiral, into the red). To the point where base salaries in the
US$5-10M range were fairly common - more common than today, after six
or seven years of startling revenue growth at the top. So one patch
came out limiting the top salary to 50K UKP/week (what, US$4M/year?).
But they hadn't yet fixed the problem where some players would still
/demand/ more than that, and so would play out their contracts, and
sit waiting by the phone - for a year or two, until in their
desperation they lowered their demands below the limit, and the person
who got there first could sign them for free. Which was, of course, a
godsend to human players who couldn't both outbid Man U for players
and pay an inflated transfer fee for the privelege.